They have sold Venezuela with Venezuelans still inside

The “biggest oil deal in world history” between Donald Trump and Delcy Rodríguez, brokered through the controversial businessman Alejandro Betancourt, marks a pivotal moment in Venezuela’s history. And it does so for all the wrong reasons: the scale of what was negotiated, the opacity of the process, the lack of democratic legitimacy of those who negotiated it, and the extraordinary powers it grants Washington over Venezuela.

Although it will very likely bring a multibillion-dollar inflow of investment to Venezuela, it is a bad deal. So bad that, for the first time in more than two decades, the opposition and dissident members of Chavismo (the ruling movement founded by the late president Hugo Chávez) have joined in condemning it. From what little has leaked, a troubling conclusion can be drawn: handing the United States 35% of 55% of Venezuelan oil and another 20% at steep discounts, “at no cost to U.S. taxpayers,” and for the space of a century, is an absurdity and a burden that will weigh on generations to come.

They have sold Venezuela with Venezuelans still inside.

More than an oil agreement, this is a Faustian pact. The ruling Chavista government gets what it most needs: political survival. Washington gets what it most desires: privileged access to one of the world’s largest oil reserves and unprecedented oversight over the Venezuelan economy. The immediate benefit may be the recovery of a devastated country. The historical cost, however, is far harder to calculate: a cession of sovereignty on an extraordinary dimension.

That appears to be the agreement’s underlying logic. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed last week that the United States must control Venezuela’s oil revenues to prevent rulers and elites from stealing the country’s resource wealth again. The irony is obvious: those rulers and elites are the very same people who have been in power for nearly three decades. But Rubio is not seeking to break that continuity; he is seeking to manage it. Because to control Venezuela’s oil wealth, the Trump administration must control the political conditions surrounding it, and that requires stability, not change.

It is a spurious agreement from beginning to end and must be denounced for what it is: the counterpart to the U.S. tutelage over Venezuela that has enabled Washington to control the country’s wealth since Nicolás Maduro’s removal.

But there is more. It is the beachhead for a broader influx of Trump-linked oil, financial and telecommunications companies into the country, a network of allies and business associates that includes figures who have served in his administration and donated to his campaigns. That includes the companies Sable and Primavera, as The Financial Times has reported.

That tutelage has only been possible because the Chavista troika has guaranteed its operation on the ground. The hidden side of the oil agreement is a second, political pact that allows Chavismo to remain in power with the blessing of the White House. In other words, the Rodrigato — the government of acting President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who is head of the National Assembly — is handing over the country in exchange for power.

Alejandro Betancourt occupies a singular place in this story. The most prominent of the so-called bolichicos, the young businessmen who became extremely wealthy through contracts with the Chávez government, is not a mere intermediary: he is the bridge between the corruption of old Chavismo, the survival of a post-Maduro order and Washington’s interests. According to Marc Caputo in Axios, it was Betancourt who connected Delcy Rodríguez with Marco Rubio in the early hours of January 3, while U.S. troops stormed Fuerte Tiuna. Other Venezuelan sources maintain that his ties to Trump’s circle go back much further. If the Qatar talks at the end of 2025 had already revealed that Delcy was being positioned as Maduro’s successor in a negotiated transition, we now know who helped close the circle, and who has an interest in ensuring that circle is never broken by an election.

Trump confirmed this point when, asked about presidential elections in Venezuela, he replied that “they’re not ready.” The remark was both cynical and revealing. An overwhelming majority of Venezuelans support holding elections in the near term, but elections would introduce precisely the uncertainty that the new architecture of power in Venezuela was designed to avoid.

Therein lies the paradox of the agreement: it may attract the investment Venezuela’s economy needs to emerge from ruin while simultaneously entrenching a system that denies Venezuelans the right to determine their own future and deepens the country’s dependence on Washington under Chavista rule.

Trump has shown little regard for Venezuelan democracy. What matters to him is business and the advantages he can extract from it. If Venezuelans are already happily dancing in the streets, as he has repeatedly claimed, why would they need elections or democracy? Faustian bargains always offer something desirable. That is why they are so seductive. Venezuelans may well see short-term economic improvements. But the hidden cost is existential: it has been achieved through alliances with anti-democratic forces, and it will ultimately be paid for in sovereignty, institutions and the capacity for self-determination.

Venezuela’s ruling elite has already signed on. It has abandoned the defense of national sovereignty and the anti-imperialist struggle that for years served as the ideological justification for its political project. In return, it received a survival bonus.

After several days of silence, María Corina Machado condemned the opacity of a negotiation conducted behind closed doors by a government lacking democratic legitimacy, but stopped short of questioning the Trump administration’s role as the other party to the agreement. That caution is understandable. It is also a mistake: denouncing only one of the signatories is tantamount to accepting the other.

Machado therefore risks becoming trapped within the logic of the Faustian bargain. If Chavismo has traded sovereignty for political survival, she cannot simply wait for Washington to correct the problem whenever it sees fit. Trump is interested only in preserving a power structure that allows him to advance his own interests.

Machado would do well to understand that there are only two ways to emerge unscathed from a relationship with Trump: through absolute submission or by wielding as much power as he does. The first may win favors, but it offers no guarantees. Machado already tried the diplomacy of deference when she presented Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize diploma after the January 3 snub, when the MAGA leader humiliated her by describing her as weak and undeserving of respect. It failed because Trump does not want her. And because he does not want her, he does not see her as the central figure in his Venezuelan project.

There is a third way of dealing with Trump: standing up to him. The best recent example is Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who responded to Trump’s tariffs despite knowing the economic cost to Canada would be significant. Canadians understood that some concessions come at too high a price, and they rewarded Carney with their support.

Machado does not have the power necessary to challenge Trump on equal terms in any arena. But she has something no one else has: the support of a majority of Venezuelans. That is why she should defy him, return to the country immediately, reunite a fractured opposition, re-energize politics and mobilize the public to demand the renewal of the electoral authority and free presidential elections. She must challenge both the Rodrigato and the system of tutelage that sustains it.

But first, she must understand her role in what is at stake and recognize that this may be her last chance. Only then will Venezuela keep alive the hope of reclaiming its freedom and renegotiating the biggest oil deal in world history, rather than going down in history as a de facto colony that never even becomes the 51st state of the Union. And only then will she remain worthy of the responsibility Venezuelans entrusted to her when they chose her as opposition leader with 93% of the vote. The challenge before her is not simply to defeat Chavismo. It is to prevent the Faustian bargain from becoming Venezuela’s permanent destiny.

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